Ashley Callari, a rising senior music performance major studying with Dr. Jesus Alfonzo, will be attending the Aspen Music Festival and School this summer. Aspen is one of the world’s leading summer institutions for emerging musicians. With nine programs of study, four orchestras, opera, chamber music, performance classes and lectures, students receive a combination of intensive one-on-one instruction and professional performance experience. Each student steps into an extraordinary musical world of unparalleled depth and breadth, including the most diverse student bodies of any summer classical music program. Along with private instruction, orchestra/instrumental students rehearse and perform major repertoire side by side with their teachers and/or with principal players from major orchestras, including those of New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, San Francisco, Cleveland, Chicago, Dallas and Philadelphia. Orchestras perform weekly or accompany one of two professional operatic productions. Soloists and conductors vary by week and are among the world’s most revered classical musicians.

Alumni of Aspen’s viola program play in every major orchestra in the U.S. and many of the best professional orchestras in Europe. While at Aspen, Ashley will study with Victoria Chiang (professor at the Peabody Conservatory) and Stephen Wyrczynski (as of Fall 2027, professor at the Rice University Shepherd School of Music, currently professor at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music). Both teachers are world-class artists who are greatly respected for their work and the success of their students. They have former students playing in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Sarasota Orchestra and more.